“WE QUIT!” THE GREAT RESIGNATION DECODED

SANGEETA WADDHWANI EXPLORES WHY SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES – EVEN TRADITIONAL CORPORATIONS – ARE BEING ASKED TO EVOLVE, REVIEW THEIR ATTITUDES AND STRUCTURES… OR RUN AN EMPTY SHIP!

The Great Resignation.

The destabilisation of evil bosses.

No More Squid Game… Game Over!

Step into your CEO’s shoes, and Imagine how it would feel to walk into your company headquarters, to find computers blinking blankly at you, plonked on abandoned desks, with bewildered peons wondering when the Old Normal will return. Little guessing that what has happened is subtler than a paycheck… truly other-worldly. And irreversible.

‘According to the US Labour Department, around 4.5 million employees left their jobs in November 2021, a trend observed since September 2021 with 3 per cent of the workforce quitting their jobs each month. This amassed a record 75.5 million resignations in 2021 in America alone, and the trend is expected to continue into 2022. Furthermore, 23 per cent of the workforce expressed a desire to switch to new companies in 2022.’ (Source:jagranjosh.com)

Says Michael Karp, a Canada-based creative professional who is American, “Notice that the US COVID relief checks to individuals cost half a trillion dollars. But the US government didn’t actually have the money. So they printed it. So one of the major causes of the Great Resignation was the stimulus checks, which paid people to “resign”. And since the stimulus checks were fake money, that caused the highest USA inflation in 40 years.”

The ‘Great Resignation’ was further augmented when the American administration refused to provide employee benefits in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The movement was also fuelled by a new awareness of subtle burnout, a switch from 9-5 office grids to an unprecedented work-from-home culture, and for many, an opportunity to review what could be a more suitable profession, and a fresh review of long term goals. Amid the Great Resignation, a strike wave known as Striketober began, which many economists describe as the employees participating in a general strike against poor working conditions and low wages.’

THE GREAT RESIGNATION? OR THE GREAT RENEGOTIATION?

THE PICTURE IN INDIA

In a country as populous as ours, skilled workers have been, more often than not, taken for granted. While the sprouting of start-ups with a digital spin grew by leaps during the Pandemic, when one chatted with employees, one found that salaries were conservative, far below what market rates were. In some start-ups, employees were expected to be ‘okay’ if paid upto 20 days late. In others, they were expected to work 13-hour weekdays, with no recourse to a gym, no family-time factored in… with an overseer who may even take sadistic pleasure in not letting an employee leave work at 7.30pm on a Saturday!

 

Now imagine this new ‘sab-exploit karo’ culture of the Great Indian Start-Up movement, confronting a workforce that had been finding new ways of living after L&L hit them – Lay offs and Lockdowns. These talented and skilled people had started embracing their homes and hearths with a new viguour. Many were Pandemic Reborns, released corporate ‘prisoners’ from their hazardous-to-health work routines (remember ‘sitting is the new smoking’). No more doing the sitting-duck- for-lifestyle-diseases routine, no more doing the hum angrezo ke zamaane ke jailor hai eight hours, Monday to Friday (but at least that meant free weekends, unlike with the start-ups). The Pandemic showed us that we were as creative and efficient without the ‘baby-sitting’ protocols of office timings, and capable of multi-tasking across domestic and work responsibilities.

 

In the first year of serial lockdowns, I found myself a turbo-charged, pro-evolutionary machine, refurbishing my kitchen – something I couldn’t do for 13 odd years working the sacred Fixed Hours. Yes, I missed my colleagues and the on-call help from the IT guys, but I had devoted enough time to the business of ‘business’ and now wanted to float in a parallel universe of independent writing, video blogging, and jumping on the proliferation of courses available online, reskilling furiously for a Brave New World where profit had suddenly abandoned my beloved print media.

YOU MUST ADJUST!

To quote Emmy award-nominee Seema Taparia’s viral wisdom, ‘YOU HAVE TO ADJUST.’

Sure there was wallet culture shock. One felt diminished not running around doing impulse purchases, taking endless uber rides to events, or booking flights to anywhere for any reason… but frankly, those elaborate wardrobes and hectic lifestyles were out of synch with the Universal agenda. The Universe wanted us to stop leaning on consumerism and fossil fuel consumption which was slowly killing us by health issues caused in turn, by a dying planetary ecosystem.

I can swear on all my Dolce & Gabbanas, McQueens and Michael Kors purchases, which had hardly been touched in two years, that this New Religion had me as a convert. I found a New Abundance came along with the conversion… the freedom to use my time as I wished. My tarot cards helped me appreciate this – I repeatedly saw the card for ABUNDANCE show up, and when I read the meaning, it indicated that with the kind of time I had, a whole portal of new possibilities lay in front of me. Never had online learning hit such high notes – one could sing along with Asha Bhosle, pick the bleached bones of storytelling from Salman Rushdie or learn how to write a Netflix webseries with Shonda Raim (Masterclasses), or learn screenwriting from our very own Boman Irani. Post the first major lockdown of 2020, I uploaded my first e-book on the conundrum of dating in young India, called MIND THE GAP! Which hit the sweet spot… No 1 in its category on Amazon, within four days. Almost immediately I could see it as a webseries on Netflix!

After tasting such an eclectic menu, a routine job with its politics and pressures, its limited and fixed use of one’s abilities, feels like a return to the era of black and white cinema. Our skilled work force has now learned to deliver on deadline while waking up to endangered birds chirping, the aroma of lemongrass tea mixed with grass laced in morning dew, many sitting in rented homes in Goa, Alibag or even all the way up in Rishikesh. They are able to squeeze in time for morning yoga, time to sit with the kids for homework and of course, Zoom-dabaad when one wants to meet, talk to or teach the world when necessary.

While there are no statistics to support this, the media grapevine had it that many young people working in traditional media organisations decamped and started independent careers as social media managers, or digital marketing pros. For them, going back to a single-channel life, aka a regimented life in an office in a concrete jungle, would be like going back in time and watching Doordarshan, where the signature shehnai ‘logo’ tune warned of centrally powered broadcasts encased in superb predictability.  Boss-log, wake up and smell the matcha – the human spirit has been taught to dream and fly again… and the attrition rate in many industries is proof of this Pandemic pudding.

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‘Boss-log, wake up and smell the matcha – the human spirit has been taught to dream and fly again… and the attrition rate in many industries is proof of this Pandemic pudding’

– SANGEETA WADDHWANI

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‘People now value the flexibility to work from home as much as they would a 10% salary hike. As a result, companies are now offering flexible work weeks with many shifting permanently to work from home’

– PLANET MONEY

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‘It’s time for organisations to wake up and smell the coffee because their people are! One of my favourite quotes on leadership is attributed to Alexander the Great “ There go my people, and I will follow because I am their Leader”’

–   MIMI RAO 

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It hardly came as a surprise when I saw a newsletter from Planet Money, authored by Greg Roselsky, titled, The Great Resignation? Looks More Like the Great Renegotiation!  We read in this, that “Americans are not en masse rejecting consumerism, moving off the grid, and living off the land. Most still need money. Some of those quitting are older workers deciding to retire early in large part because their finances have been buoyed by surging stock and housing markets. Others are secondary earners who have stayed home because they have had to take care of kids while schools have closed due to COVID-19 — or because, more simply, working face-to-face during a pandemic sucks.”

I had a chance to get live inputs from friends either walking away from the 9-5 or pandering to people walking away from it. My friend Mimi Rao, Associate Director for Technology with Ernst & Young, has recently transited from the UK to India and is contemplating an early retirement, and she refers to this mass shift also as ‘The Burnout Pandemic’.  Says she, “One of my favourite quotes on leadership is attributed to Alexander the Great. “There go my people, and I will follow because I am their Leader.”

Among the many ‘whys’ of The Great Resignation she concludes that the real elephant in the room, is the work-life balance. “Human beings are programmed to believe that death is something that happens to others, and we are eternal, yes there is death somewhere in the distant future but it’s not a real concept in our lives, so time too feels unlimited. The pandemic brought about a paradigm shift; everyone knows someone who has lost a loved one. Time has become limited and precious. We are no longer a society that wants to miss a parent teacher meeting for a work meeting. A zero less in the bank balance is happily traded for a child’s soccer game. This is also a great correction, a realigning of priorities.”

Of course, the legitimate question would be, so, what’s paying the bills? “Well people are not idling, they are working better and smarter and technology has been the great equaliser in the game! The number of new start-ups where people have turned hobbies into work are booming, trading in currencies is no longer the prerogative of traders in ivory towers, it’s accessible to millions on their smart phones! The gig economy is here to stay, work hard for some time and play hard after to rejuvenate! Part time remote working from beaches and mountain tops is spreading faster than the pandemic.”

She believes that organisations which respond to this shift will sustain a happy and healthy workforce. This, and any set up supportive of a sustainable planet, “will be the final winners in this game. It’s not the corporate jungle anymore, it’s the serene calm of the ocean we seek.”

Kiran Addala, the India Business Head of JBrown, (www.jbrown.com) a London-headquartered real estate consultancy with a global presence, has seen the property enquires for Alibag and Khandala/Lonavala and Coorg in South India, sky rocket post-Pandemic, which mirrors the quest for a more soulful life. “We see a significant increase in demand for land and properties, with better access thanks to the Ro Ro service, and smaller boats also plying there. It’s a fantastic weekend getaway. We have seen a significant increase in property and land prices, as well. So for example, we had a property sold a few years ago, which has now tripled in value, and still has takers! This is a great indicator. There is a scarcity of land in the prime areas of Alibag, because it has been a prominent holiday spot for high networth individuals, celebrities, and industrialists for some years. But now there is an even greater hunger to be by the sea, to relish fresh air and open spaces and beautiful views even from the hills. It is going to be the Goa of the West Coast of India… and a highly convenient weekend escape.”

He has also seen a demand for having Vaastu consultants involved, even before the paper work is done! He also sees world class architecture finding its place in this offshore paradise, with new design narratives coming into play.

“More recently, a helicopter company wants to purchase land for a helipad, based on research looking at the traffic between Mumbai and Alibag!” he shares.

Clearly, the M2M Ferries Ro Ro (Roll-On-Roll-Off service for private cars, saving 111 km of driving) is a mega-post Pandemic success story. The social ‘scene’ onboard the Ro-Ro open-air decks competes with the best of social institutions like city clubs and popular events – yours truly was witness to this last weekend itself!

All indications point to a ‘Back to Nature’ quest… trust me, you are freed of the stress hormone cortisol, responsible for perhaps making India the diabetic capital of the world…just the smell of rich and fecund soil around your swimming pool as you come up for air, just the feel of early morning sun on your Vitamin-D hungry skin, and the nerve-soothing sand under your feet as you stroll at sunset on a beach… your mind-body system thanks you for FINALLY ‘getting’ life. It’s all about nurturing the present moment… with friends, family and plenty of nature….

The Great Resignation is leading the way….